Does the Amount of Sleep Affect Wages?

I’ve discussed the science of sleep here before. Elements of our arguably overstimulated society can make it difficult to get some truly good rest. Not only does this lead to highways full of practically drunk people, it also lowers our productivity at work. For example, new research from one pair of economists find that increased sleep gain lead to wage gains in both the short run and the long run. From the abstract:

We investigate the labor market effects of the single largest use of time—sleep. Motivated by a productive sleep model, we show that sleep is complementary to work in the short run and complementary to home production for non-employed individuals in both the short and long run. Using time use diaries from the United States, we demonstrate in both parametric and non-parametric frameworks that later sunset time reduces worker sleep and wages. After investigating these relationships and ruling out alternative hypotheses, we implement an instrumental variables specification that provides the first causal estimates of the impact of sleep on wages. A one-hour increase in location-average weekly sleep increases wages by 1.3% in the short run and by 5% in the long run.